Film

Concessions

Stuff That Happened in 1969, Cinematic and Otherwise

by Lindy West

Well, it's 2009, y'all, and you know what that means! The year 1969 just turned 40 years old! (I figured that out without a calculator, BTW. Brain math. Fuck yeah.) Anyway, 1969 is important because all kinds of things happened in 1969. Richard Nixon began his career as sweatiest president ever. Things were not great in Southeast Asia. Humans flew through space and hopped around on the moon. The gays rioted. The fucking Manson Family stabbed everyone! I celebrated my negative-13th birthday. Woodstock happened. Altamont happened. Monty Python's Flying Circus happened. Pete Townshend hit Abbie Hoffman in the head with his guitar. Samuel Beckett won a Nobel Prize.

Ken Griffey Jr. (overbite), Linus Torvalds (nerd), Chastity Bono (lesbo), Lexington Steele (porno), Desmond on Lost, Sawyer on Lost, Ice Cube (not his real name), Bobby Brown (who helped Whitney Houston poo on television), Elliott Smith (who stabbed himself in the heart), and Nancy Kerrigan (just seems annoying) were all born. Judy Garland died of too many pills.

So that's why, for the rest of 2009, the Northwest Film Forum is focusing on the cinema of 1969—in its words, "Hollywood struggled to keep up with the great shifts of the time, and the studios made awkward dance partners with a new generation of irreverent independent, foreign, and avant-garde filmmakers." The 69 series (or, as your little brother would say, the "Heh Heh Huhuh series") kicks off this week with Easy Rider (Jan 9–15 at 6:45 pm) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Jan 9–15 at 8:30 pm).

Easy Rider, in the haze of my collegiate memory, is kind of unbearably boring. I mean, I like sideburns and Jack Nicholson (especially young Jack Nicholson) as well as the next non-deaf-blind person, but Easy Rider always seemed to make a better dorm-room poster than a film. If I wanted some heavy-handed '60s counterculture and magical psychedelia and Dennis Hopper's eyeballs (he's got the crazy eyes, you know) driven forcibly down my throat on a pair of ridiculous motorcycles, I'd just—well, I don't want that. Ever. But I'm going to go see it anyway.

Then there's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—buddy film, gorgeous western, object lesson in attractiveness—in which bandidos yanquis Robert Redford and Paul Newman bicker, quip, mustache, and blue-eye their way all the way to Bolivia. You've obviously seen it before, and you should obviously see it again.

Other 69 films coming up in the next couple of months include The Milky Way (Luis Buñuel), Oh! What a Lovely War (sarcasm), Stereo (early Cronenberg), They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (ouch, my malaise!), and approximately one million other great things. Approximately. Brain math.